Tollman

plant utilisation, maximise net profit (“not necessarily sales but net profit”), and the company is successfully doing that, more or less through its efficien- cy. “The government doesn’t seem to support manufacturing; it says the cost of wages is too high. I think this is broad and sweeping statement. Wag- es are high, but so is the cost of living,” Dodson states. “If you put in measures of efficiency and get you unit costs of production down, maybe use a 25 tonne reactor instead of a 5 tonne one, those kinds of labour costs can be reduced.” And as such, that’s how Tollman op- erates. The company has a very lean overhead of staff. It streamlines as much as it can and there aren’t too many bums on seats: “Most of our people are in the facto- ry, producing.” In fact, in the future, for some of its packaging lines, the company will be looking at using robots to reduce la- bour, “and that’s one way of increasing your profit” Dodson rationalises. Growth P roduct D evelopment In terms of keeping the business go- ing, and indeed growing, Dodson is heavily focused on not just the devel- opment of its existing workstreams, but on creating new ones. As such, the business has and does continue to see the benefits: “Our sales increased remarkably last year, they’ve plateaued a little bit, but they should climb again next year,” says Dodson. Whilst Tollman has been in the field of manufacturing general chemicals for a long time, that which is its base- line, it has since become heavily in- volved in agricultural herbicide man- ufacturing (as previously mentioned). Furthermore: “This year, we’ve got another busi- ness starting where all the products are made by Tollman, but marketed through this new business.” These products are wetting agents used in conjunction with herbicide in an agri- cultural field. Another big advancement on the Toll- man agenda: a year and a half ago, Dodson hired a highly skilled technol- ogy development specialist who has been key in developing a number of products for Tollman. One of these be- ing a product Dodson described as being as “better than anything on the market”, but furtively, and understand- ably, he cannot say much more until the product is released. The company also has a product de- velopment chemist onsite creating ad- ditional products in quite a variety of